London musicals tickets

Quite possibly the most aggressively ‘80s artefact in existence, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Starlight Express’ is a musical about anthropomorphic roller skating trains that often feels like being forced to watch ten consecutive episodes of some trashy Saturday morning action cartoon. It’s loud. It’s dumb. It barely has characters in any meaningful sense. Richard Stilgoe’s lyrics are kind of anti-Sondheim: it’s a show that makes your brain contract with every second that passes. And yet to complain ‘Starlight Express’ isn’t very clever is like complaining tigers aren’t very good at accountancy. It exists as pure spectacle, and where the original production ran out of steam on the West End way back in 2002 (after a near 18 year stint), this revival from ‘& Juliet’ man Luke Sheppard supercharges it. Staged at what would appear to be enormous expense, the nouveau ‘Starlight Express’ has given Wembley’s hi-tech but hitherto under-utilised Troubadour Wembley Park a real sense of purpose. The production is billed as ‘immersive’, and while I’d argue that’s a stretch, the reconfigured auditorium - designed by Tim Hatley - is extremely cool, with the audience divided into little seating areas that the roller skating actors whoosh around at roughly head height.   Oh yeah, roller skating. Ultimately ‘Starlight Express’ is inseparable from its original conceit, which is that the actors playing the trains skate around the venue. Maybe one day after it’s fallen out of copyright somebody will...

The idea of a musical version of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief – the first of Rick Riordan’s Greek-gods-in-contemporary-New York series of YA novels – is on the face of it an eye-wateringly ambitious one. There has already been an expensive film and an even more expensive TV series following the supernatural adventures of Jackson, the gawky demigod son of Poseidon. You might therefore think a musical would need to have a fair amount of wodge behind it – much more than the modest means of this off-Broadway hit now staged anew at The Other Palace would suggest.  In fact it’s clear early on that a low-ish budget counts in the favour of Joe Tracz and Rob Rokicki’s adaptation. The extreme goofiness of Riordan’s books has never really made it to the screen, but writer Tracz and musician and lyricist Rokicki play it up a treat, with witty punk pop songs and a loose, freewheeling tone and DIY aesthetic that’s closer to a cabaret show than a meticulously sculptured Broadway opus. Indeed, the fact that Riordan’s novels are as much a sardonic homage to New York as they are to Ancient Greece certainly helps considerably in this respect – it feels very NYC, Max Harwood is fun as hapless, nasal-voiced schoolboy Percy, who has no idea that he’s in any way unusual until he gets attacked by a Fury while on a class trip to MoMA. His mum reveals his deadbeat dad was actually a Greek god – and is then killed by a minotaur as she takes him to the safety of Camp Half-Blood, a demigod...

The posters have been plastered around the London Underground for years – long enough for this show to become the most successful musical of all time – but nothing prepares you for the sheer impact of 'The Lion King's opening sequence. With the surge of 'Circle Of Life' reverberating through your chest, Julie Taymor's animal creations march on, species by species. Gazelles spring, birds swoop and an elephant and her child lumber through the stalls. It's a cacophonous cavalcade that genuinely stops you breathing. You'd think Noah's Ark had emptied onto the stage. For a global blockbuster, 'The Lion King's absolute theatricality is astonishing. Techniques from all over the world – African masks, Japanese Kabuki costumes, Malaysian shadow puppetry – are smashed together in an explosion of spectacle. It's perfect for a musical, allowing both distinct flavours and an eclectic carnival spirit. Admittedly, things deflate when it sacrifices this defiant originality for subservient approximation of the film. Timon and Pumba (Damian Baldet and Keith Bookman), though impressively like their screen counterparts, step into the savannah from a different dimension. The hyena-infested elephant's graveyard swaps menace for goofiness and the famous stampede scene, so delicately handled and moving in the film, is merely ticked off with a sigh of relief. The familiarity of the film is a root cause of the show's commercial success. But, ironically, 'The Lion King' can't afford such...

This review is from 2021. The current cast is headed by Ben Joyce (Marty) and Cory English (Doc).  This long-gestating musical version of ‘Back to the Future’ – it has literally taken longer to bring to the stage than all three films took to make – is so desperate to please that the producers would doubtless offer a free trip back in time with every ticket purchase if the laws of physics allowed. It is extra as hell, every scene drenched in song, dance, wild fantasy asides, fourth-wall-breaking irony and other assorted shtick. You might say that, yes, that’s indeed what musicals are like. But John Rando’s production of a script by the film’s co-creator Bob Gale is so constantly, clangingly OTT that it begins to feel a bit like ‘Back to the Future’ karaoke: it hits every note, but it does so at a preposterous velocity that often drowns out the actual storytelling.  As with the film, it opens with irrepressible teen hero Marty McFly visiting his friend ‘Doc’ Brown’s empty lab, where he rocks out on an inadvisably over-amped ukulele. Then he goes and auditions for a talent contest, hangs out with his girlfriend Jennifer, talks to a crazy lady from the clock tower preservation society, hangs out with his loser family… and takes a trip 30 years into the past in the Doc’s time-travelling DeLorean car, where he becomes embroiled in a complicated love triangle with his mum and dad. It is, in other words, the same as the film, with only a few minor plot changes (the whole thing...

The original NT theatre Hadestwon cast of Reeve Carney (Orpheus), André De Shields (Hermes), Amber Gray (Persephone), Eva Noblezada (Eurydice) and Patrick Page (Hades) will reunite at the West End production Feb 11-Mar 9 2025. What a long, strange trip it’s been. Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle, which she gigged around New England before scraping the money together to record it as a critically acclaimed 2010 concept album that featured the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on guest vocals as the various mythological heroes and villains. Going through the next 14 years blow-by-blow would be time-consuming, but in short thanks to what I can only describe as THEATRE MAGIC, Hadestown is now a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It played the National Theatre in 2018, on its way to becoming the most unusual Broadway smash of the modern era. And it’s finally come back to us. Now in a normcore West End theatre, its otherness feels considerably more pronounced than it did at the NT. The howling voodoo brass that accompanies opener ‘Road to Hell’ is like nothing else in Theatreland. Mitchell”s original songs are still there but have mutated and outgrown the original folk palette thanks to the efforts of arrangers Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose. Rachel Hauck’s set – which barely...

I’ll tell you what’s fetch: Tina Fey’s writing. With the original ‘Mean Girls’ film 20 years old, ‘30 Rock’ having wrapped up over a decade ago and even ‘The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ now a receding memory, it’s easy to forget how funny this woman was at her zenith - if I were to ballpark it I’d say that she accounted for about 75 percent of the joy the average millennial liberal felt in our otherwise-joyless twenties. I will admit that I didn’t see the 2024 ‘Mean Girls’ film, which simultaneously served as a contemporary remake of the cult classic original, and a screen adaptation of the musical adaptation that was first seen in the US in 2017.  But the ‘Mean Girls’ stage musical that finally arrived in London in 2024 is very, very funny. And it’s not because it’s a nostalgic evocation of the film, which follows naive homeschooled teen Cady Heron as she’s thrust into a clique-riddled Illinois high school, with hilarious results. It’s because Fey has straight up rewritten lots of the jokes and she’s done a spectacular job, her characters riffing away merrily on everything from air fryers and Ozempic to the Dali Lama's tongue-sucking incident. There’s an effortless funniness to her acerbic, surreal, pop-culture infused dialogue, a real sense of ‘oh yeah, Tina Fey is a genius isn’t she?’ Unfortunately she isn’t a songwriting genius, and here’s where ‘Mean Girls’ comes unstuck. The songs – with music by Fey’s husband Jeff Richmond and lyrics by Nell Benjamin – are not funny....

‘Remember us from your GCSEs?’ It’s Henry VIII’s six wives – and they’ve back, bitch, to re-tell ‘her-story’ as a slick, sassy girl band. Think Euro-pop remixes of ‘Greensleeves’, Anne Boleyn spouting tweenage text-speak (‘everybody chill/it’s totes God’s will’), and K-Howard warbling #MeToo tales of gropey employers. ‘Hamilton' looms large here, and although ‘Six’ has its own moments of clever-clever hip-hop rhymes, it’s a tough comparison: this musical started life as a student show (Cambridge, obvs). But its creators, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, have succeeded in crafting almost brutally efficient pastiche pop songs – here a ballad, there a ballsy, blinging R&B number – performed with snappy dance routines by a talented, diverse cast (and all-female band). Since inception the show seems to have been given a good lick of gloss, too; it stands up in the West End. But beneath its super-shiny surface, ‘Six’ is totes vacuous. And so basic in its feminism that it’s hard to believe it’s written by, like, actual Millennials. The whole thing is staged as a deeply unsisterly competition, each wife getting a song in which to prove they’re the biggest victim, the one who suffered the most at Henry’s hands. This is treated weirdly as comedy though, OTT shrieks and snarks escalating until they’re actually in a catfight, pulling each other’s hair. Several of the wives are characterised as dim and ditzy; some also as sexually provocative and vain. But by adopting the contemporary pop...

While the RMS Titanic proved to be all too sinkable, this titanically camp musical spoof of the James Cameron film should sail on for quite some time. Or at least it will if its manifest target audience  – unsubtly shouted out to as ‘gays’ at least twice during the show – is as enthusiastic for it here as in New York, where it’s been sitting pretty off-Broadway since 2022. Devised by Tye Blue (who also directs), Marla Mindelle, and Constantine Rousouli, Titanique is basically a cabaret-style parody that marries the considerable kitsch appeal of the 1997 film with that of its true star – Quebecois singing icon Celine Dion, forever associated with the movie thanks to ubiquitous power ballad My Heart Will Go On. The show’s undoubted masterstroke is making Dion the main character. Although clearly standing on the shoulders of previous US performers, Lauren Drew is sublime as the Canadian chanteuse. Ostensibly here to tell us the story of the sinking from her perspective, Drew’s spangly whirlwind perfectly captures the real Dion’s peculiar mix of old-fashioned showbiz cheese, mad aunty dottiness and weapons-grade lung power, while less realistically painting her as a delusional (albeit affable) narcissist who genuinely believes she was on la Titanique. Early on I felt a bit iffy over whether this was entirely appropriate given Dion’s recent health problems - does it feel cruel to parody a version of her that we probably won’t see again? But ultimately it’s an affectionate,...

A labour of love that has worked its way slowly to the West End over the five years since it debuted at Southwark Playhouse, at its best Jethro Compton’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an extraordinary thing, a soaring folk opera that overwhelms you with a cascade of song and feeling. It is based on F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story, and shares a premise: Benjamin Button (John Dagliesh) is a man inexplicably born at the age of 70, who then begins to age backwards, leading to a strange, exhilarating, sometimes extremely sad sort of life. Writer/director/designer Compton’s interpretation is very different to both Fitzgerald’s and the 2008 David Fincher film starring Brad Pitt. For starters it’s not set in nineteenth century America, but is virtually a love letter to Compton’s native Cornwall, its story spanning much of the twentieth century.  Fitzgerald’s plot is loosely followed, but heavily tinkered with – one of the more significant changes is having Dagliesh’s Benjamin born with a full adult’s mind and vocabulary rather than beginning life as a baby in an old man’s body. More to the point, it has a joy, romance and big-hearted elan that stands in stark contrast to Fitzgerald’s cynicism and the dolefulness of Fincher’s sloggy film. Indeed, despite tragic notes from the off – Benjamin’s mum takes her own life early on – the tone is largely whimsical and upbeat, focussing on the eccentric minutiae of Cornish village life, from oddball shopkeepers to dozy sheep....

This review is of the original 2021 cast.  Until Katherine Langford and Adam Gillen are the stars of the smash revival until Jan 25 2025.  From Jan 28 until May 24 2025 Billy Porter and Marisha Wallace will star as The Emcee and Sally Bowles. Come to the cabaret, old chums, and see the stage performance of the year from Jessie Buckley! Gasp at the terrific supporting cast in Rebecca Frecknall’s luxury revival of Kander & Ebb’s musical masterpiece, foremost Omari Douglas’s passionate, tender, little boy lost Clifford! Be wowed by Tom Scutt’s literally transformative design! Wonder at the free schnapps you’re offered on the way in, and nod in polite appreciation at the pre-show entertainment! Also… there’s Eddie Redmayne. Now, I have absolutely nothing against the guy. But the presence of any hugely famous, Oscar-winning star is bound to distort the role of the Emcee of the Kit Kat Club: the Weimar-era Berlin bar in which ‘Cabaret’s tragic heroine Sally Bowles plies her trade. The Emcee is a vital supporting role: his sardonic songs set the mood of the show, and map Germany’s descent into darkness. But it’s in no way the lead role – in fact, the character barely interacts with the actual story. Putting by far the most famous actor in the show in the role would be enormously distracting even if they didn’t do… this. Wearing a series of beautiful, subtly sinister outfits that kind of feel like they’re trying to process every single one of David Bowie’s sartorial choices from...